Monitoring data packets transmitted through a network switch presents significant engineering challenges. For example, costly test equipment plugged into a port of a network switch impacts the signal integrity and latency of data packets and can only monitor a single port at a time. Also, a network administrator may desire to monitor a network during normal operation to identify over-utilization and under-utilization of network components and to identify nascent failures. As another example, diagnosing data center network problems can be difficult and expensive.